scholarly journals Gaining Nationhood: A Comparative Analysis of Images Found in Ontario and Quebec History Textbooks, 1920 to 1948

Author(s):  
Catherine Duquette ◽  
Rose Fine-Meyer

The centenary of the beginning of the First World War has seen renewed global attention to the war. A proliferation of scholarly works, commemorative public events, documentaries, and museum exhibits dedicated to the war ensured that the participating nations reaffirmed messages of service and sacrifice. The global response provides some insight into how nations crafted the memory of the war and the links made between remembrance and national identity. The Canadian War Museum, along with various state commemorations, encased the events of the war within narratives of heroism and sacrifice, most recently with the celebratory focus on the Battle of Vimy Ridge. This renewed interest in the war inspired this study, which explores how the war was portrayed in Ontario and Quebec history textbooks in the immediate post-war decades. This project argues that an analysis of both the textual narratives and the visual culture portrayed in history textbooks helps us better understand messages of nationhood in Canada. Through an examination of history textbooks that were approved in Ontario and Quebec between 1920 and 1948, we seek to uncover what the Ontario Department of Education, the Catholic church, and publishers felt were important for students in schools to remember about Canada’s participation in the war.RésuméLe centenaire du début de la Première Guerre mondiale a contribué à renouveler l’intérêt du public pour la Grande Guerre. On observe alors une prolifération des ouvrages académiques, des événements commémoratifs publics, des documentaires et des expositions muséales qui y sont dédiés et dont le but est de réaffirmer le message de service et de sacrifice des États qui y ont pris part. Ces ouvrages et événements donnent un aperçu de comment les nations construisent leur mémoire de la guerre ainsi que des liens tissés entre le devoir de mémoire et l’identité nationale. Le Musée canadien de la guerre, ainsi que plusieurs commémorations gouvernementales, synthétisent les événements de la Grande Guerre dans un récit d’héroïsme et de sacrifice. Un exemple récent de cela est l’intérêt porté à la bataille de la crête de Vimy. Cet intérêt renouvelé envers la Grande Guerre a inspiré cette étude qui explore comment celle-ci a été représentée dans les manuels scolaires de l’Ontario et du Québec dans les décennies suivants la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale.  Ce projet propose qu’une analyse des manuels centrés sur les récits textuels et de la culture visuelle aide à mieux comprendre les messages associés à la construction de la nation canadienne. À partir d’un examen des manuels scolaires approuvés pour l’Ontario et ceux disponibles pour le Québec entre les années 1920 et 1948, nous cherchons à découvrir ce que le Département de l’Éducation de l’Ontario, l’Église Catholique et les maisons d’éditions considéraient comme étant importants à ce souvenir à propos de la participation du Canada à la Première Guerre mondiale. 

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-514
Author(s):  
Udith Dematagoda

This article explores Wyndham Lewis's experience of the First World War, and its influence on his varied artistic output. It interrogates how Lewis's initial ambivalence towards an emergent technological society shifted through direct encounters with mechanized warfare, and speculates on the effect of these upon his post-war writing and criticism. By contrasting Lewis's thought against that of his Italian Futurist contemporaries, I will demonstrate the centrality of their divergent conceptions of masculinity in accounting for this opposition – and how Lewis's critique of technological society prefigures contemporary opposition towards the post-humanist philosophy of Accelerationism.


Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics


Author(s):  
Billie Melman

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen ◽  
Ismar Dedović

Abstract This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.


Modern Italy ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gundle

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.


1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 359-370
Author(s):  
James F. McMillan

Joan of Arc died at the stake in Rouen in 1431. She became a canonized saint of the Catholic Church only in 1920. It is well known that the wheels of the Vatican grind slowly, but 500 years is a long period to wait for sanctity, even by Roman standards. Obviously, in a short communication such as this, there is no time to explore the rich afterlife which Joan enjoyed between her death and her canonization. Rather, the more modest purpose of this paper is to show how her achievement of canonical status was preceded by a well-orchestrated campaign conducted by French Catholics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If Joan was finally reclaimed as a Catholic saint and martyr, it was primarily because she was successfully represented as the very epitome of a heady blend of religion and nationalism that was one of the more distinctive and powerful forces of the era of the belle époque and the First World War.


Balcanica ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Dimitrije Djordjevic

This paper discusses the occupation of Serbia during the First World War by Austro-Hungarian forces. The first partial occupation was short-lived as the Serbian army repelled the aggressors after the Battle of Kolubara in late 1914, but the second one lasted from fall 1915 until the end of the Great War. The Austro-Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia covered the largest share of Serbia?s territory and it was organised in the shape of the Military Governorate on the pattern of Austro-Hungarian occupation of part of Poland. The invaders did not reach a clear decision as to what to do with Serbian territory in post-war period and that gave rise to considerable frictions between Austro-Hungarian and German interests in the Balkans, then between Austrian and Hungarian interests and, finally, between military and civilian authorities within Military Governorate. Throughout the occupation Serbia was exposed to ruthless economic exploitation and her population suffered much both from devastation and from large-scale repression (including deportations, internments and denationalisation) on the part of the occupation regime.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 184-191
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock ◽  
Sofia Permiakova ◽  
Gesa Stedman

This introduction offers a survey of some important critical approaches to the ways in which the First World War and its aftermath have been studied, conceptualized, represented and commemorated. In particular, it notes recent scholarly interest in issues of gender, as well as a focus on widening the geographical range of the conflict beyond a dominant European paradigm. A recurrent theme is the emergence of new types of modernity in the post-war era, and the ways in which literature and the arts do not merely reflect that modernity, but actively shape and constitute it.


Cliocanarias ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Perfecto García ◽  

The regime of general Francisco Franco imposed a nationalist model from two ideological sources: the nationalcatholicism, an antiliberal proposal of the Catholic Church that identified Spain with catholicism; and the anti-liberal and fascist alternatives born in the heat of the European political-social crisis and Spanish of the First World War. The political model was strongly centralist, authoritarian and interventionist around Castile and the Castilian language, rejecting the other nationalist models. At the social level, the corporate proposal stood out by means of the compulsory framing of workers and businessmen in the Spanish Organización Sindical, the unique trade union of Francoism led by the unique party Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS


2019 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-268
Author(s):  
Frans-Jos Verdoodt

De Heilige Stoel, d.w.z. het hoogste bestuurslichaam van de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk, toonde tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog in ruime mate begrip voor de verzuchtingen van de Vlaamse beweging. In de ogen van ‘Rome’ waren die verzuchtingen terecht: op grond van hun miskenning in het verleden, verdienden de Vlamingen, na de afloop van de oorlog, een tegemoetkomende houding vanwege de burgerlijke en kerkelijke overheid. Dat de katholieke aartsbisschop Désiré Mercier (1851-1926) die tegemoetkoming radicaal bleef afwijzen, stuitte in Rome nauwelijks op begrip. En dat de kardinaal-aartsbisschop zich daarenboven steeds meer profileerde als het symbool van het verzet tegen de Duitse bezetter versterkte het ongenoegen bij sommige leden van de Romeinse Curie.De Heilige Stoel mocht dan wel oordelen dat de Vlaamse Kwestie na de oorlog moest worden beslecht, zolang die oorlog woedde, wenste men een pragmatisch standpunt in te nemen: de bezetting was beslist een kwaad, maar daarom diende men nog niet op te roepen tot een burgeroorlog.__________ Roma locuta, causa finita? The Holy See, that is to say, the highest administrative body of the Roman Catholic Church, demonstrated a broad understanding for the aspirations of the Flemish Movement during the First World War. In the eyes of ‘Rome’ these aspirations were just: on account of the poor treatment that they had received in the past, the Flemings deserved an accommodating attitude from the civil and ecclesiastical authorities after the end of the war. The fact that Catholic archbishop Désiré Mercier (1851-1926) remained radically opposed to this accommodation was met with bewilderment in Rome. What’s more, the fact that the Cardinal-Archbishop also began to present himself more and more as the symbol of resistance to the German occupier strengthened the displeasure among some members of the Roman Curia.The Holy See could certainly proclaim that the Flemish Question needed to be settled after the war; so long as the war raged they wanted to take a pragmatic point of view: the occupation was certainly wicked, but still, one did not have to call for a civil war on its account.


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